British Art Fair

Private Collection, USA
Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK

Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, published by The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 1992, no. 422 (Opus 184), p.207

Gimpel fils, 1962, no.30

After art college training with interruptions, Adams had done his war service as an engineer, teaching himself to carve wood at the end of the war.  His first sculptures in wood, plaster and eventually also stone bore some resemblance to the anthropomorphic vertical forms of Moore, veering between hollowed out rounded, meshed forms and assemblies of stacked irregularly shaped blocks, demonstrating an a mastery of matters of weight and balance in his forms, inspite of the deliberate asymmetry of his figures.  In the spirit of Moore’s ‘truth to material’ credo, Adams’ showed particular sensitivity to the grain and structure of wood, just as he would in the way he exploited the natural properties of the metal forms he used in later works.

An interest in architecture and collaborating with architects would influence his direction towards ‘construction’, and in that sense, by 1952 he stood out in Read’s selection of sculptors for that Venice Biennale as the closest to ‘geometry’ but the furthest from ‘fear’.  For the ensuing five years, beginning with the series of exhibitions at the painter Adrian Heath’s flat at 22 Fitzroy Street in London in 1952, Adams would exhibit with the Constructivists in a group around Victor Pasmore, Mary and Kenneth Martin, and Anthony Hill, but his work remained closer to the lyrical abstraction of Heath’s painting rather than the strict geometric discipline being developed by the others.  Adams’ ‘Vertical Construction’ of 1951 still had superficial similarities with Butler’s contemporary work – its verticality of course, but also transparency and the appearance of drawing in space – but already the irregular stacking of shaped planes anticipated Adams’ spare, measured use of flat or curved linear forms.

While continuing to work in wood and stone in the early 1950’s he also learnt to weld, and began to exploit iron in its basic form of rods and sheets in order to assemble architecturally frontal sculptures.  These would work as screens of reliefs rather than free-standing sculptures in the round.  With one of his largest works to date, a free-standing relief called ‘Monolithic Form’ which foreshadows several works in the 1960’s such as ‘Vertical Screen Form’ and indeed ‘Opus 145’, Adams explained: ‘Monolithic Form is an attempt to create outdoor sculpture using simple abstract forms in relationship, the forms themselves creating the ‘life’ by their opposition to each other, as well as giving directions to certain thrusts and movements within the main form.  These heavy angular forms were intended to contrast with and oppose the landscape rather than become one with it’.

Of the 1952 Venice sculptors, only Paolozzi and Adams would participate in the now famous exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the I.C.A. in 1956.  Adams collaborated with Frank Newby, Peter Carter and the architect Colin St John Wilson on a convex entrance ‘tunnel’ incorporating geometric elements in relief to form a sculptured three-dimensional, architectural environment.  In 1957 Adams explained that as a consequence of this collaboration; ‘during the past year, forms in my work have changed from rectangular to curvilinear; solid mass and weight has given way to light linear forms and curved planes, and a fresh element – counterbalance – has appeared’.

This counterbalancing is seen in its fullest realization in the commission for a giant concrete relief screen  to run the length of the new theatre in Gelsenkirchen in Germany, completed in 1969.  In it Adams’ angled projecting and receding elements create a measured rhythm of light and shadow, and of movement and stasis on a truly monumental scale.

Gimpel Fils, London
Private Collection, UK, purchased from the above, 2006.
Osborne Samuel, London

Unique

This is the maquette for Two Circular Forms No. 2 , exhibited at the XXXI Biennale in Venice, 1962 when Adams represented Britain, now in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’ Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome.

It was Reg Butler, not Robert Adams, who suggested that ‘there is no such thing as abstract art …. The question of abstraction was one of degree.   [Sculptors wished] to resolve their problems in a visual form, and this could not be called abstract art’ at a discussion at the I.C.A’s showing of ‘London – Paris: new trends in painting and sculpture’ in 1950.  It characterised the tone of a continuing debate in early post-war years around the validity and relevance of definitions, and artists’ desire to escape from dogmatic pigeon-holing in order to pursue their own explorations and creations, beyond critical judgments about belonging or not belonging to current movements and styles.

After art college training with interruptions, Adams had done his war service as an engineer, teaching himself to carve wood at the end of the war.  His first sculptures in wood, plaster and eventually also stone bore some resemblance to the anthropomorphic vertical forms of Moore, veering between hollowed out rounded, meshed forms and assemblies of stacked irregularly shaped blocks, demonstrating an a mastery of matters of weight and balance in his forms, inspite of the deliberate asymmetry of his figures.  In the spirit of Moore’s ‘truth to material’ credo, Adams’ showed particular sensitivity to the grain and structure of wood, just as he would in the way he exploited the natural properties of the metal forms he used in later works.

An interest in architecture and collaborating with architects would influence his direction towards ‘construction’, and in that sense, by 1952 he stood out in Read’s selection of sculptors for that Venice Biennale as the closest to ‘geometry’ but the furthest from ‘fear’.  For the ensuing five years, beginning with the series of exhibitions at the painter Adrian Heath’s flat at 22 Fitzroy Street in London in 1952, Adams would exhibit with the Constructivists in a group around Victor Pasmore, Mary and Kenneth Martin, and Anthony Hill, but his work remained closer to the lyrical abstraction of Heath’s painting rather than the strict geometric discipline being developed by the others.  Adams’ ‘Vertical Construction’ of 1951 still had superficial similarities with Butler’s contemporary work – its verticality of course, but also transparency and the appearance of drawing in space – but already the irregular stacking of shaped planes anticipated Adams’ spare, measured use of flat or curved linear forms.

While continuing to work in wood and stone in the early 1950’s he also learnt to weld, and began to exploit iron in its basic form of rods and sheets in order to assemble architecturally frontal sculptures.  These would work as screens of reliefs rather than free-standing sculptures in the round.  With one of his largest works to date, a free-standing relief called ‘Monolithic Form’ which foreshadows several works in the 1960’s such as ‘Vertical Screen Form’ and indeed ‘Opus 145’, Adams explained: ‘Monolithic Form is an attempt to create outdoor sculpture using simple abstract forms in relationship, the forms themselves creating the ‘life’ by their opposition to each other, as well as giving directions to certain thrusts and movements within the main form.  These heavy angular forms were intended to contrast with and oppose the landscape rather than become one with it’.

Of the 1952 Venice sculptors, only Paolozzi and Adams would participate in the now famous exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the I.C.A. in 1956.  Adams collaborated with Frank Newby, Peter Carter and the architect Colin St John Wilson on a convex entrance ‘tunnel’ incorporating geometric elements in relief to form a sculptured three-dimensional, architectural environment.  In 1957 Adams explained that as a consequence of this collaboration; ‘during the past year, forms in my work have changed from rectangular to curvilinear; solid mass and weight has given way to light linear forms and curved planes, and a fresh element – counterbalance – has appeared’.

This counterbalancing is seen in its fullest realization in the commission for a giant concrete relief screen  to run the length of the new theatre in Gelsenkirchen in Germany, completed in 1969.  In it Adams’ angled projecting and receding elements create a measured rhythm of light and shadow, and of movement and stasis on a truly monumental scale.

Phillip Wright

‘Michael Ayrton: Drawings and Sculpture’. Cory, Adams & MacKay (London: 1966) no.40

The series of bronzes and drawings depicting Figures in Balance draws its imagery from the world of the circus, and to this extent echoes the subject matter of his earliest paintings. Central to it, however, was Ayrtons interest in the logistics of the human form motivated in part by the artist’s growing arthritic condition. The momentary equilibrium in the midst of tension and movement is superbly captured.  

The Artist, thence by family descent

Osborne Samuel Gallery, London

Dennis Farr & Éva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-1996, Lypiatt Studio, Stroud, 1997,p.314, cat.no.763S

Edinburgh, Mercury Gallery, Lynn Chadwick, 25 February-31March 1983, cat.no.9 (another cast)

Cloaked Couple V conceived in 1977 demonstrates how by joining together the male and female figures Chadwick was able to explore the ideas of tenderness and intimacy in his paired sculptures. With the separated couples the owners’ can determine their positioning and relationship to one another; they can be controlled and expressed in a myriad of ways. But with the fusing of the bronze cloaks, at a position where the lower arms and hands meet underneath, an unbreakable bond is created between the sexes which is first established in Chadwick’s mature phase in his life-size Two Reclining Figures (1972). The emphasis shifts, as the 1970s progress and the technique developed, to an emotional level, where the figures’ humanity is realised in new terms. With Cloaked Couple V the subtleties of the woman’s stretched neck and positioning of face leaning into her companion imply a moment of privacy and dialogue is occurring which, as viewers, we are privileged to share.

Michael Bird comments on Chadwick’s work from this time:

‘His increasing tendency to interpret his work in terms of human relationship, rather than formal balance, begins to be audible. “Presences” was how he referred to his new figure sculptures; they were about being, not doing: “I used to call them Watchers, but no longer. Sometimes they are not watching anything. What they are doing is illustrating a relationship – a physical relationship – between people”. It was through this relationship, not through purely formal or allusive qualities, that he wanted his sculptures to speak: “If you can get their physical attitudes right you can spell out a message”‘ (Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Lund Humphries, Farnham, Surrey, 2014, p.147).

Irving Goodman, famous trumpet player, LA (purchased in the UK late 1980’s)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel Gallery, London

The Artist

Tony Reichardt, 1979

Marlborough Fine Art

Private Collection, Belgium (purchased from the above c.1980)

Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr & Éva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p.297, cat.no.672

The winged figure, often presented as a pair, threads through Chadwick’s sculpture from the mid-1950s onwards. Early examples often danced in duet, their wings splayed in courtship ritual. In 1962, Chadwick transformed the idea completely, starkly abstracting its form to resemble aeroplane wings: Two Winged Figures, constructed from plate steel at an industrial works in Italy, and painted bright yellow and black, towered above the viewer.

If there was always a dialogue between the human and the machine, by the early 1970s Chadwick’s imagery had settled in favour of the former. Maquette V Two Winged Figures (1973) is, on balance, more human than otherwise. The wings, folded downwards, resemble robes. The female figure is clearly identifiable as such, broad-hipped and round-breasted, while the square shoulders of the male figure determine the geometric fall of his tunic and wings. But the head? So often in Chadwick’s sculpture this is where ambiguity concentrates. Heads resemble beaks, science-fiction jaws, insectoid mandibles, square television monitors. Sometimes they are reduced almost to invisibility, seeding doubt as to their sentience. In Maquette V Two Winged Figures, Chadwick characteristically uses a cube and pyramid to denote difference. Borne erect, and rendered proportionally in relation to each figure’s torso, these heads give cause for reassurance – yet the frisson of alterity persists.

Sir Colin & Lady Anderson, London 
Christie’s, London, November 18, 2005, lot 115
Private Collection, USA (Acquired at the above sale)
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-1996, Stroud, 1997, no. C53S., illustration of another cast p. 363

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

Monnow Valley Arts. The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection of British Neo-Romantic Art. ABC Print Ltd: Hereford. p.18

Belonging to the esteemed Nicolas and Frances McDowall collection of British Neo-Romantic art, Boy with Bird is an exquisite and highly worked pencil drawing, dating from circa 1942, an important and formative period in John Craxton’s early career. In the catalogue which accompanied Monnow Valley Arts’ 2015 exhibition, Nicolas stated, ‘This entrancing little pencil drawing is one of the most concentrated neo-romantic statements in our collection. Sadly, we do not have a Samuel Palmer Shoreham drawing but this I feel is almost as perfect an elixir.’1

His reference to Palmer and Shoreham hints at the influence the artist’s iconic work during the 1820s and 30s in Kent imparted on Craxton. It was through Craxton’s friendship with the wealthy, avid art collector and arts editor of Horizon, Peter Watson, that he first became aware, through proofs, of two of Palmer’s sepia drawings from 1825, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Ian Collins comments in his Craxton monograph, ‘John took these revelatory images as touchstones for his own times
and nature’.2

Stylistically, Boy with Bird shares affinities to other works on paper from the same period, including Dreamer in Landscape from 1942 (Tate Gallery) and a larger 1943 oil painting, Shepherd and Rocks (Britten-Pears Foundation), the latter of which incorporates the same profile of a shepherd holding his staff, who is flanked by a cave rather than lush foliage. Both make strong suggestions of the boy using the surrounding landscape to shelter and protect himself, a theme which Craxton explored at this time. It may be no coincidence that Henry Moore’s new ‘shelter drawings’, as they have become known, depicting London’s residents sleeping on underground platforms at safety from the Blitz, were on view at the National Gallery. During this time, Craxton’s friendship with Lucian Freud began, and the two would often depict birds in their works, either shown on their own or part of a wider composition, where there would usually be a direct interaction between man and the bird. In Boy with Bird the encounter is portrayed as benign, as in Craxton’s Man Feeding Bird from 1942, which the artist gifted to Lucian Freud. Craxton himself explained the motivating factors behind these key works produced during the midst of conflict of
World War II:

Between 1941 and 1945, before I went to Greece, I
drew and occasionally painted many pictures of
landscapes with shepherds or poets as single figures. The landscapes were entirely imaginary; the shepherds were also invented – I had never seen a shepherd – but in addition to being projections of myself they derived from Blake and Palmer. They were my means of escape and a sort of self-protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet. I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery, and I was drawn to the idea of bucolic
calm as a kind of refuge.3

1. Monnow Valley Arts. The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection
of British Neo-Romantic Art. ABC Print Ltd: Hereford. p.18
2. Ian Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, 2011, p.38
3. op. cit. p.41

Sale, Christie’s London, 7 June 1991, lot 207
Christopher Hull Gallery, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2018)
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Ian Collins (ed.), John Craxton, Lund Humphries, London, 2011, no. 165, illustrated, p. 136

Tokyo, Tokyo International Biennale, New Image in Painting, 1974, illustrated in the catalogue

From May 1946, when John Craxton first moved to Greece, through to 1967, much of his work drew on its people, nature and landscapes for inspiration. He depicted sailors, fishermen and shepherds, along with taverna life, coastal scenes, local animals (particularly goats) and the bountiful sealife. But a coup in April 1967 resulted in a military junta ruling Greece, after which a fractious and suspicious relationship developed between Craxton and the new regime, with accusations of espionage. The situation did not improve and eventually the artist decided to leave his beloved Greece.

Travelling was on the agenda once again, with an absence from Greece for much of the 1970s. At first Kenya (1970), then Tunisia (1971) and Morocco (1972). By 1973, the year Volcanic Landscape was painted, Craxton found himself on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Ian Collins comments on this time, ‘Craxton warmed to stark Lanzarote, with camels and peasants labouring in a black moonscape where each man-made crater held a single fig tree or vine. He added lava dust to the pigment for a series of literally gritty pictures.’ 1

It is this description which we are presented with in Volcanic Landscape. The lava dust has been liberally and thickly applied to create interesting textures and depth to the picture surface. The single, sparse tree winds its way up through the centre of the composition, above which a prehistoric bird commands the upper third. The goat lower centre, outlined in pink and feeding on the lone tree, reminds us of Craxton’s love affair with Greece.

The whole painting is infused with a dream-like atmosphere as the psychedelic sky with its pink, yellow and green pigments and blazing sun, highlights the ancient volcanic scene below.

1  Ian Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, 2011, p.132

Monnow Valley Arts. The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection of British Neo-Romantic Art. ABC Print Ltd: Hereford. p.22

Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York
Private Collection, USA

Osborne Samuel, London

James Fitzsimmons, Elisabeth Frink, Art International, vol. 232, no. 2, May 1979, p. 19 (another example illustrated)
Bryan Robertson, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, Salisbury, 1984, no. 220, pp. 108, 185 (another example illustrated)
Edward Lucie-Smith, Frink A Portrait, London, 1994, p. 46 (another example illustrated)
Elisabeth Frink: Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat., Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 11 June – 29 August 1994, p. 31 (another example illustrated, p. 14)
Stephen Gardiner, Frink The Official Biography of Elisabeth Frink, London, 1998, p. 187 (another example illustrated, p. 203)
Annette Ratuszniak ed., Elisabeth Frink, Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, London, 2013, no. FCR 248, p. 130 (another example illustrated)

Winchester, Great Courtyard, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture in Winchester, 17 July – 13 September 1981 (another example exhibited)
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture and Drawings, 1952 – 1984, 8 February – 24 March 1985, p. 52 (another example exhibited and illustrated, pp. 17, 25)
Washington D.C., The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1950 – 1990, 1990, pp. 8-9, 65 (another example exhibited and illustrated)

Conceived in 1975, Dame Elisabeth Frink’s series of Tribute Heads explore themes of suffering and endurance, inspired by the work of Amnesty International and the stoic resolve of the nameless figures around the world who have been persecuted as a result of their beliefs. The artist began this series shortly after her return to London following a number of years living in France, continuing her exploration into the same forms and subjects that had underpinned her Goggle Heads and Soldiers’ Heads sculptures. For Frink, the head was a conduit through which she could channel an array of emotions, one which allowed her to delve into the internal psychological landscape of her figures. As she explained: ‘Heads have always been very important to me as vehicles for sculpture. A head is infinitely variable. It’s complicated, and it’s extremely emotional. Everyone’s emotions are in their face. It’s not surprising that there are sculptures of massive heads going way back, or that lots of other artists besides myself have found the subject fascinating’ (E. Frink, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Frink: A Portrait, London, 1994, p. 125). Through subtle alterations from figure to figure in this series, Frink captures an insightful glimpse into the full emotional impact these experiences have on the individuals involved.
Pairing the features back to the minimal suggestion of its essential forms, the artist focuses our attention on the figure’s highly nuanced expression, eloquently conveying a careful balance of tension and serenity in their face. In this way, the figure at the heart of the present work retains a poise and dignity, as they defiantly face their torment. Frink, reflecting on this aspect of the Tribute heads, explained: ‘they are the victims, except that they are not crumpled in any sense … they’re not damaged. They’ve remained whole. No, I think they’re survivors really. I look at them as survivors who have gone through to the other side’ (E. Frink, National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives interview with Sarah Kent).

From the Artist directly to:

Redfern Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above, 2001)

Osborne Samuel Gallery

Adrian Heath, at the centre of a small group of British avant-garde artists in the 1950s, was responsible for compiling Nine Abstract Artists (1954): a book including statements by the artists concerned – himself, Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore and William Scott – while contextualising their work in the development of abstract art since the 1930s. The publication was preceded by three exhibitions mounted in Heath’s studio at Fitzroy Street, London, where paintings and sculpture were displayed in a stylish, quasi-domestic environment.

Photographs of the first exhibition, in March 1952, show two oval paintings by Kenneth Martin and Victor Pasmore, a format that Heath would adopt for a series made between 1956 and 1959. For Heath, the origin lay in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book, On Growth and Form (1917), which demonstrated the ubiquity of spiral structures in nature. Oval Theme (1) builds outwards from a central red wedge, unfurling through larger slabs of colour towards the edge of the composition. The materiality of the work – incorporating hessian and Polyfilla – endows it with a tough physicality. 

In Nine Abstract Artists, Heath identified the importance of the size and format of the area to be painted, as well as his intention that colours and forms should bear evidence of their transitions, becoming richer through the process. As he wrote,

The thing of interest is the actual life of the work: its growth from a particular white canvas or board.[1]

With Oval Theme (1), the relatively large scale and unusual format directed the evolution of the composition. 

[1] Adrian Heath, ‘Statement’ in Lawrence Alloway: Nine Abstract Artists: their work and theory (London: Alec Tiranti, 1954).

[2] Adrian Heath, letter (1 February 1971), in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972 (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).

Private Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

In 1965, at the height of his career, Hilton dismantled his London studio and moved to Cornwall, where he had painted since the 1950s. His new studio was in a cottage in Botallack, on the first floor overlooking the moors. It was there that he would paint Untitled (1971), now in the collection of the Tate. That same year, 1971, the Waddington Galleries presented Hilton’s sixth solo exhibition of paintings and drawings. Norbert Lynton, reviewing the exhibition, noted a dazzling variety among the works, some apparently referential, others abstract, a ‘gamut of possible marks and splotches, lines, colours’. The common denominator was freshness: ‘Each [painting] is driven home and left to its own devices, sufficient and vibrant, unpropped by theory or process’.₁ 

Although Hilton painted less and less during these later years, as his health declined, he did so with intensity. His work continued to walk a tightrope between figuration and abstraction, with curves suggesting breasts or hills, hard lines the outline of a house or a table’s edge. This allusiveness had been noted as early as 1958, in terms of landscape, but it was not until 1974 that there was critical acknowledgement of ‘a streak of the erotic’ in Hilton’s painting.₂ In Untitled (1970) there is an ambiguous interplay between landscape and the figure. The painting’s tonality suggests warm earth colours, including a strangely defined vegetal form, but the delineation, through drawing, evokes human contours.

₁ Norbert Lynton, ‘Waddington Galleries, London’, Studio International (November 1971), p. 195–6.
₂ Michael Shepherd, ‘Streak of the Erotic’, Sunday Telegraph (17 March 1974).

Rev. F.G. Coats O.B.E (Ivon Hitchens’ brother-in-law)

His sale; Sotheby’s, 1979

Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

The artist’s family
Osborne Samuel, London

Illustrated Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)

Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)
Crane Kalman Gallery, London (1986)
Gillian Jason Gallery, London (1990)
Bridge Gallery, Dublin (1997)
Penwith Gallery, St Ives (1996)

The context of St Ives, where Denis Mitchell lived from 1930 until the late 1960s, was critical to his creative development. Trained as a painter, he undertook piecemeal employment as his young family grew, working as a market gardener, fisherman and tin miner. In 1949 he became principal assistant to Barbara Hepworth, and that same year he carved the work he regarded as his first sculpture. Ballet Dancer, which was admired by Ben Nicholson, abstracts gently from the human form, rendering it as two stacked rhomboids, pierced to indicate the dancer’s angled legs and raised arms. From some angles a body is clearly discernible, but as it turns, the outline dissolves into abstraction, to become an exquisitely balanced combination of forms.

In 1952 Mitchell’s work was exhibited in ‘The Mirror and the Square’, at the New Burlington Galleries in London, alongside sculpture by Hepworth, Chadwick and Caro. The exhibition aimed to explore the urgent issues of realism versus abstraction, although its extent and diversity proved too great for most to draw any firm conclusions. Yet Mitchell’s adherence to abstraction was already clear. During his ten years as Hepworth’s principal assistant, he would hone his instinct for carving and the purity of form, exploring the abstract implications of enfolding, modular or asymmetrical structures, even when his titles implied figurative origins.

When Mitchell turned to bronze in the 1960s, by necessity using a local sand-casting foundry at St Just, he brought a remarkable degree of sophistication to the process, filing and polishing the somewhat rough casts to create sculptures that were both elegant and aesthetically unified. Patrick Heron, in his introduction to Mitchell’s exhibition at the Marjorie Parr Gallery in 1969, wrote,

… a Mitchell is a form, usually a single, rather streamlined form, enclosed as it were by a single skin … In such art, intuition and intellect are always inextricably locked. ₁

Roseveor (1985), a woodcarving, exemplifies this premise. The split monolith appeared as a formal device in Mitchell’s work in the early 1960s, around the same time that John Hoskin (like Mitchell, a one-time member of the artists’ cricket team at St Ives) was also exploring its form. Hoskin used welded steel to create a series of linear split columns. Mitchell, essentially a carver, created volumetric forms which curve and taper, ‘conceived’, as Heron recalled, ‘under the maker’s hand’. ₂

Mitchell had worked with assistants since the early 1960s, among them Breon O’Casey. By the mid-1980s his assistant was Tommy Rowe, like Mitchell a fisherman, a sculptor and former assistant to Hepworth. Mitchell returned to earlier sketchbooks for ideas, choosing those he now felt he could alter and perhaps improve. Roseveor thus relates to Argos (1974), as well as to Boscawen (1962), sculptures with an upright form and a characteristic ‘U’ or ‘V’ shape. Detecting in Mitchell’s sculpture an affinity with Nicholson, whose white reliefs were carved from a single piece of wood, then meticulously painted in coat after coat of Ripolin paint (‘always getting to the heart of things with practicalities’), O’Casey nonetheless discerned the greater influence of painters such as John Wells or Roger Hilton:

There is a shape of Roger Hilton’s, a large lump with two uneven horns, that you can see, for example in [Mitchell’s] Geevor, or Talland. ₃

Mitchell seldom used yew for his carvings, the only other known instance being Torso, dating from 1951. Yew possesses a characteristic warmth, orange-brown to purple in colour, with a natural lustre and pronounced grain that can be seen clearly in Roseveor. Consummately carved, Roseveor also evokes a primal quality, redolent of the non-western carvings Mitchell admired and collected.

₁ Patrick Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’, exhibition catalogue (London: Marjorie Parr Gallery, 1969).
₂ Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’.
₃ Breon O’Casey, in Denis Mitchell and Friends, exhibition catalogue (Dublin: The Bridge Gallery, 1997), p. 11.

The Artist, May 1981, from whom acquired by
Private Collection, New Zealand
Private Collection, U.K.
With Berkeley Square Gallery, London, 2003, where purchased by
Private Collection, U.K. by whom gifted to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel, London (Formerly Berkeley Square Gallery)

Alan Bowness, Henry Moore: Volume 6, Complete Sculpture, 1980-86, London, 1999, p.37, cat.no.790 (ill.b&w., another cast)

Rome, Vigna Antoniana, Henry Moore, 1981
Ravenna, Moore, Sculture, disegni e grafica, 1986 no.13 (illustrated)

Height excludes base.

A cast is owned by the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, UK

Though a pervasive theme throughout Moore’s oeuvre, the artist created more images of the Mother and Child in the final decade of his life than in any other period of his career.  Moore wrote in 1979: “The ‘Mother and Child’ is one of my two or three obsessions, one of my inexhaustible subjects. This may have something to do with the fact that the ‘Madonna and Child’ was so important in the art of the past and that one loves the old masters and has learned so much from them. But the subject itself is eternal and unending, with so many sculptural possibilities in it—a small form in relation to a big form, the big form protecting the small one, and so on. It is such a rich subject, both humanly and compositionally, that I will always go on using it” (quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 213). 

Marlborough Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in June 1983
Private collection

Henry Moore, 85th Birthday Exhibition: stone carvings, bronze sculptures, drawings (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1986, illustration of another cast p. 66
Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore Complete Sculpture 1980-1986, vol. 6, London, 1986, no. 873, illustrations of another cast p. 54 & pl. 114

Dimensions include artist’s bronze base

A cast from the edition is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, gifted by Jeffrey Loria

The original plaster for this work is in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation and visible in the Bourne maquette studio. One child is shown with the mother. 

Moore made several drawings for and of this sculpture, using the device of two children to emphasise the interaction between the children and the mother. This is the only recorded sculpture with this theme

Sir William Rothenstein

Mrs Alan Ward (his daughter)

Peter Nahum Ltd., London

Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

London, Leicester Gallery, Collection of Sir William Rothenstein, June 1946, cat.no.26

Sheffield, Contemporary Art Gallery, Collection of Sir William Rothenstein, April-May 1970, cat.no.45

Study for a wood engraving, one of seven included in Places and published in 1922 by Heinemann in two editions, one of 55 copies and the other of 210. 

The Leger Galleries, London
Private Collection

Osborne Samuel, London

Nicholson’s work in Italy, although closely related to the central concerns of his art, is a special category in his oeuvre, which demonstrates his appreciation of Italian architecture and landscape. He visited Italy in 1950 and this was his first trip to the country since the end of the Second World War. Nicholson produced various drawings of some of his most favourite views throughout Italy – the regions of Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. Peter Khoroche has commented that, “laying no claim to a technical or historical knowledge of architecture, what interested him was the shape, the proportion, the lie of a building…Building, like objects, were a starting point only, naturally there was no point in mere imitation…Architecture in landscape offered an opportunity to combine his love of precise structure with his feeling of poetry and acute sensitivity to the spirit of place”.

A gift from the artist to Sir Norman and Jean Reid in 1976, and by descent

Recently returned to England after thirteen years in Switzerland, Ben Nicholson made this drawing at his new home in Great Shelford near Cambridge. Its irregular shape is characteristic of drawings and reliefs from the early 1970s, some of whose titles explicitly evoked landscapes in Italy or Greece. Typical, too, is its linear composition: a counterpoint of geometric and curvilinear forms.

Ostensibly abstract, Composition (1972) conjures a landscape in tones of sepia and grey, in the foreground of which is a transparent tracery of lines. The unity of the image derives from repetition: three curved silhouettes resting on a tripartite broken ground, against a backdrop divided into three. The combination of oil wash with pencil was used contemporaneously by Nicholson in works such as May 1972 (Hubberholme), where space is emphasised by contrasting a block of colour against a delicately drawn landscape of church and trees. In Composition (1972) there is a similar dialogue between the incisive lines of the drawing and the loosely brushed background, encouraging the eye to focus first on one then the other.  

The Leicester Galleries, London
The Honourable Ralph Henry Bathurst
Sotheby’s 1951
B. Jonzen
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, 1953
The Estate of the Late Michael Stratton
Thence by descent

Lilian Browse, William Nicholson, London, 1956 (where titles Monkton Deverill and assigned to c.1922)

Patricia Reed, William Nicholson, Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings, Modern Art Press, London, 2011, no. 694, p.535

London, The Leicester Galleries, 1934, no.14 (as Monkton Deverill)

London, The Leicester Galleries, 1949, no.94 (as Monkton  Deverill)

London, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, 1954, no.3 (as Monkton Deverill)

William Nicholson is celebrated as a painter of the Downs, whether those of Sussex, or Wiltshire where he lived at for over a decade from 1923 at Sutton Veny. One noticeable difference between these two areas is that the thin layer of top soil over chalk of the Sussex Downs could support only flocks of sheep, watered by dew ponds, whilst in this part of Wiltshire the chalk downs fed by streams support arable farming in the fertile valleys, as well as sheep.

Nicholson observed the subtle changes in tone and colour indicating the different crops planted and how they altered over the seasons. Haystacks and corn stooks, withy beds and water meadows became subjects for his expansive landscapes, together with  cloudscapes and undulating hills and valleys seen in this painting. One of the most attractive rivers with its clear water running over chalk and gravel beds is the Wylie. Rising on White Sheet Down to the west of Sutton Veny the River Wylie turns north towards Warminster as it wanders through the Deverills, starting at Kingston Deverill, then Monkton Deverill and on until it reaches Longbridge Deverill. These settlements are medieval or older and grew prosperous trading in wool and corn. The river then runs around the outskirts of Warminster and turns East-South-East to flow on past Sutton Veny on its way to join the river Nadder at Wilton.

The title of this painting is inscribed in the artist’s hand – Monkton Deverill. However, subsequent owners who had lived all their lives in the area identified it as Kingston Deverill: a view looking towards Brimsdown Hill taken from the road that runs between Warminster and Mere. There is in fact less than a mile between Kingston Deverill and Monkton Deverill so Nicholson, a relative newcomer to the area, might have got his Deverills confused.

Patricia Reed

Christie’s, London 1977

Private collection, purchased from above 

Scolar Fine Art, London

Private collection, UK (purchased from the above 2001)

Osborne Samuel, London

Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Winifred Nicholson,
November 21st – December 16th 1972, cat. no. 3

Looking towards Bewcastle Fells in Cumberland, Winifred Nicholson’s painting draws no boundary between still life and landscape. Rather, the ridged or striped china seems placed on a stone ledge, its patterning continuing in shadows beneath it and stretching as a ribbon – whether river or drystone wall – into the distance.

Winifred had felt a strong attachment to Cumberland since the 1920s. In 1924 she moved with her husband, Ben Nicholson, to Banks Head, an old farmhouse on the Roman Wall. This is where she would return at the outbreak of war, after her marriage had collapsed and after spending time with her young children in Paris. The theme of a still life with flowers, whether table-top or framed by a window, was the most significant, distinctive and enduring of Nicholson’s career. As she recalled, ‘I have tried to paint many things in many different ways, but my paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower.’[1] The flowers in Bewcastle, possibly white nemophila and yellow ranunculus, are painted joyously and without fussiness.

Bewcastle unites the elements of its composition not only through form, but through colour. Yellow flowers and rimmed china link to the ochre landscape, grey drawing the eye from the foreground to the hills and skittering clouds. Nicholson’s friend, the poet Kathleen Raine, paid tribute to her skill in conveying the essence of this landscape, writing,

  Mountains she loved, but above all skies; the grey luminosity of the Cumbrian skies she depicted with virtuosity in her handling of the mingling of light with cloud and mist.[2]

[1] Winifred Nicholson, ‘The Flower’s Response’, in Andrew Nicholson (ed.), Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 216.

[2] Kathleen Raine, ‘The Unregarded Happy Texture of Life’ (1984), reproduced in Unknown Colour, p. 199.

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Marlborough Fine Art, Rome
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Hugh Fowler-Wright.

John Piper was a hugely significant and influential British artist, known for his romantic depictions of ruined landscapes and buildings. This work is a moving and enigmatic evocation of the Island of Portland off the Dorset coast, that had been a major focus for the artist’s work since 1948. Drawn to the rubble strewn landscape, Piper creates an image that is simultaneously modern and ancient. The artist described it as ‘very important to me…with great blocks of stone lying about on the low quarry shore in magnificent disarray.’ These Portland works were exhibited in New York in the 1950s. Piper was a member of the avant-garde group the Seven and Five Society alongside Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens, and was designated an Official War Artist during the Second World War. His depictions of the Blitz are amongst the most famous and remembered works of the period.

Private Collection, USA

In 1943 Piper received a commission to document a slate quarry inside the mountain of Manod Mawr, north Wales, where the collections of the National Gallery were sent for safe storage during the war. While the interior proved too dark to draw, Piper took the opportunity to explore the region, using John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Wales (1898) as his guide.

Returning to Snowdonia in the summer of 1945, he discovered and rented ‘Pentre’, a cottage halfway down the Nant Ffrancon valley, through which a river runs, and to which, at the time, there was an unmade track barely passable in winter. Piper acquainted himself with the geology of the area by reading A.C. Ramsay’s The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales (1860) and by drawing the mountains repeatedly, thereby beginning to notice how rocks near to hand often resembled the contours of those in the distance. Writing to Paul Nash in November 1945, he described a gale ‘which made the clouds whirl round the mountains in circles and lifted the water off the river in spray’, adding, ‘I hope you will see the place one day.’¹

It is likely that Rocky Sheepfold, which resembles Piper’s photographs of a drystone enclosure in the Nant Ffrancon valley, relates to the landscape near this cottage.² The painting balances topographical detail against broad washes of tone, evoking the mood of lithographs commissioned for the poetry volume English Scottish and Welsh Landscape (1944), described in a review as ‘sinister … livid and menacing’.³ To the perimeter of Rocky Sheepfold, scattered stones extrude from the grass; larger boulders shelter and form part of the enclosure. Elemental and windswept, it demonstrates an opportunistic intervention into the landscape.

¹ Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 267–8.

² John Piper, photographs of sheepfold in Nant Ffrancon, Caernarvonshire (c. 1930s–1980s), black and white negatives, Tate Archive TGA 8728/3/3/10–11.

³ English Scottish and Welsh Landscape 1700–c. 1860, verse chosen by John Betjeman and Geoffrey Taylor, with original lithographs by John Piper (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1944); The Studio (December 1944), p. 192.

Redfern Gallery, London
Mrs Digby Morton (purchased from the above)
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London.
Christie’s, London, 1993

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above)

A gift from the artist to Robert and Lillian Melville.
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London 
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above in July 1987)

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Modern British Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints from 1800 to the Present Day, March – April 1986, no. 84, as ‘Group of Compositions’.
Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Alan Reynolds, August – September 2003, no. 14, as ‘Group of Compositions’.

Redfern Gallery, London
Dr Lederman, 1953 (purchased from the above)
Piccadilly Gallery, London
HJE Haggard, 1961 (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, UK

Alan Reynolds, Redfern Gallery, London, 1953

Moth Barn in the Fenlands of East Anglia is a subject Reynolds often returned to. There are several recorded versions of the same view including a watercolour in the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge. One of the three finished oil paintings is in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Alan Reynolds’ solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, in February 1953, consolidated an impressive early reputation, featuring landscapes of abstracted trees and foliage: compositions formalised into ‘silhouettes of almost Chinese assurance and decisiveness’.¹ Even before the exhibition opened, Sir Kenneth Clark had reserved the large-scale painting, Moth Barn II, September Morning (1952), for the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Reynolds made numerous paintings on the theme of ‘moth barn’, in addition to a lithograph dating from 1956. Moth Barn Interior 3 (1952) is a diminutive variation, beautifully composed from a mirroring of spiked and curved foliage, whose palette suggests winter: chalk whites and greys, with a leavening of green. Here, landscape is reduced to its bare bones, stripped of unnecessary or lush detail. Yet it is also eloquent, built upon a series of curves derived from a seed pod, expectant in the foreground. First bought in 1953 by Dr Manuel Lederman, a pioneer in the field of radiology, the painting was later acquired by the geologist H. J. E. Haggard.

¹ M.H. Middleton, ‘Alan Reynolds (Redfern)’, The Spectator (13 March 1953).

The Fine Art Society, London

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

Thence by descent

New York, Durlacher Brothers, Alan Reynolds, 6 April – 1 May 1954, cat. no. 25

In April 1954, Village, October (1953) was shown in a solo exhibition of Reynolds’ work at the New York branch of Durlacher Brothers. It was an impressive achievement for an artist still in his twenties. Reynolds had left the Royal College of Art only a year earlier, without completing his studies, following criticism from his tutors for exhibiting with commercial galleries while studying. A New York Times review described the paintings as the type of ‘severe, sullen romanticism’ in which Durlacher Brothers excelled. Based on hop fields, ‘spongy trees’ and moody skies around Shoreham in Kent, they recalled the mystically charged landscapes of Samuel Palmer, while using ‘a method of semi-abstraction that schematizes shapes’, fitting them into intricately structured compositions. The review concluded, ‘This is grave and impressive work, painted with admirable dexterity of hand.’1

Village, October (1953) depicts a landscape in tones of muted green, grey, brown and white. Its trees  include the fir, a favourite of Reynolds, characteristically reduced to a stack of curved branches. Architecture is less visible, although its presence is indicated by the gable and round window of the central building. It is a complex scene, nonetheless. The imagery is dense and claustrophobic, conveying a potent sense of the year – and the day’s light – nearing its close.

Originally owned by Frances and Nicolas McDowall, Village, October took its place alongside paintings, prints and book illustrations by John Piper, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards, Paul Nash, John Minton and Graham Sutherland, within a collection that traced neo-romantic art from its roots in the work of Palmer and Blake to artists working in the 1990s. Nicolas McDowall credited the awakening of his interest specifically to Reynolds, however, whose work he had first seen, aged fifteen, at the Redfern Gallery.  

1.    S.P., ‘Reynolds Pastorals at Durlachers’, New York Times (6 April 1954), p. 33.

The Redfern Gallery, London
The Earl Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, 5th Earl Amherst
Private  Collector, USA (gift from the above, 1985)

Osborne Samuel, London

Reynolds’ intense study of nature led him to create sketchbooks filled with botanical studies, pressed leaves, grasses, seedpods and feathers – forms upon which he based abstract landscapes during the first, figurative stage of his career. Among the most significant sequence of paintings derived from these studies was ‘The Four Seasons’, showing landscape transformed across the cycle of the year.

Legend in December (1955) relates to this series, showing a winter landscape in which the moon hangs low over the horizon. Bushes cast pallid shadows, and whitened seed heads appear like fireworks against the sky. On the roof of a chapel, haloed, is a cross mirrored in a reflection below. This detail, coupled with the title Legend in December, suggests a memory of Christmas.

Robert Melville, writing in October 1955 about Reynolds’ forthcoming exhibition ‘The Four Seasons’ at the Redfern Gallery, acknowledged the artist’s debt to Samuel Palmer, but denied that he shared Palmer’s Christian outlook. Melville instead drew attention to a reading of landscape by the writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies, who described that being ‘aware of the sun overhead and the blue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me and space. This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes straight unchecked into the unknown. It is the edge of the abyss as much if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of eight thousand miles to the sky beneath’.¹

This same sense of space permeates Legend in December, which places the horizon low within the composition to emphasise an immense sky.

¹ Richard Jefferies (1848–87), quoted in Robert Melville, ‘Alan Reynolds’, Apollo, Vl. 62 No. 368, (October 1955), p. 100–101.

Sotheby’s, 1984

Sotheby’s, 1987 (where mistitled The Ferry and dated 1940)

Sotheby’s, 1996

Private Collection UK

Williams, Andrew Gibbon, William Roberts, An English Cubist, published by Lund Humphries, 2004, p.104, fig.76

Royal British Artists Society 1949 (priced at £75)

Royal Academy 1980

Newcastle 2004, Hatton Gallery, William Roberts 1895-1980

Nottingham 2006, Djanogly Gallery,  A Day in the Sun – Outdoor pursuits in the art of the 1930’s

Chichester, Pallant House Gallery,  England at Play

Chichester, Pallant House Gallery,  Neo-Classicism in Modern British Art, 2016

Born in the East End of London in 1895, William Roberts began observing and documenting people in his local community from very early on in his career. At the age of just eighteen, in 1913, prior to the outbreak of World War I, his remarkable capacity for draughtsmanship and complex pictorial design were confidently outlined in two drawings, Leadenhall Market (Tate Gallery) and Billingsgate (Private Collection).

Then, during World War I, working as an Official War Artist, he produced some of the most searing images of the conflict on the Western Front, in particular the Battle of Ypres.

By the outbreak of World War II, and despite Roberts’ significant contribution to early British Modernism and the Vorticist movement, he and his wife Sarah were still living in poverty in London. Many artists had already escaped the capital to the relative safety of the countryside, but Roberts remained. Through various friendships, notably with Sir Muirhead Bone who was responsible for the organisation of war artists, Roberts again secured a commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, in January 1940, and was dispatched to the munitions factory at Woolwich Arsenal. Shortly after, during an early bomb raid and a direct hit on their road, the Roberts decided to follow their old friends Bernard and Nora Meninsky, to Oxford. They settled in a council flat in the suburb of Marston on the banks of the River Cherwell, the setting for his impressive oil, Parson’s Pleasure, which has also been known by the title, On the Lawn.

Andrew Gibbon Williams comments on this time, ‘The Oxford suburb of Marston, for example, in its limited way, turned out to be as generous a source of subject matter as London. A gypsy encampment around the corner from where the Robertses lived was precisely the kind of thing the artist could make something of, and the River Cherwell, with its punting, fishing and riverside picnics, offered the mixture of nature and human activity that Roberts liked best.’ 1

The area, Parson’s Pleasure, was located in the University Parks of Oxford University beside the River Cherwell, and up until as recently as 1991 was a secluded location for male-only nude bathing, traditionally frequented by dons and undergraduates of the university.

Roberts’ circa 1944 canvas, showing a group of naked men reclining and conversing, very much recalls the Classicism of the French 17^th century painter Nicolas Poussin, and is imbued with a strong sense of calculated design and stylisation. The figure located upper centre for example, preparing to dive into the river with his outstretched arms and bent knees, appears frozen in time, and the curves of the river cleverly follow the contours of the heads of the standing man upper left and seated figure upper right, with a towel over his shoulders. Everything in the canvas has an exact and purposeful positioning, which creates an overall coherent and sophisticated composition.

Commentators have readily offered high praise for the painting in this regard:

‘The impulse of Roberts to classicise, traceable through several works of the 1930s and paramount in a picture such as The Judgement of Paris, achieves a magnificent apotheosis in one of his finest works Parson’s Pleasure. It was against Roberts’ nature to wholly invent a subject, and for this reason the idea of manufacturing a nude composition for its own sake would have struck him as bogus. But the notorious Oxford student bathing spot frequented by generations of male undergraduates offered the perfect legitimising excuse.’ 2

The artist’s second spell as an Official War Artist became increasingly fractious. A trip to France, for instance, was aborted by Roberts at Folkestone who offered ‘heavy fog’ as an excuse for not making the Channel crossing. His relationship with the War Artists’Advisory Committee eventually deteriorated beyond repair, and Roberts spent the rest of the war mainly in Oxford, where he embraced the English landscape tradition, so beautifully realised in Parson’s Pleasure.

Andrew Gibbon Williams remarks on this important oil painting, ‘Parson’s Pleasure is a remarkable picture to have emerged from wartime England…Notwithstanding the abstract reliefs of Ben Nicholson and the three-dimensional work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, Parson’s Pleasure represents the most convincing attempt to recapture the Classical spirit in mid-twentieth century English art. 3

1    Andrew Gibbon Williams, William Roberts, An English Cubist, Lund Humphries, 2004, p.102

2       op. cit. p.105

3       ibid.

Gimpel Fils, London 
Galerie Angst + Orny, Munich, 1976
Christie’s, London, 24 May 2012, lot 171
Private Collection, UK

Munich, Galerie Angst + Orny, William Scott Gouachen, January – February 1976

Verified by the William Scott Foundation

Scott’s still lifes reduced a narrow canon of domestic objects to a set of outlines and solids, tilted parallel to the picture plane. If his method was avowedly to look at Cézanne through the eyes of Chardin, ₁ he brought to this vision a particularly British sensibility. David Sylvester encapsulated this tendency, neatly, as a ‘liking for strange shapes, queer, misshapen shapes, either abstracted or invented’. ² Typical, for Scott, would be the long-handled frying pan, but also lemons, grapes and, most frequently, pears.

Chelsea Suite No. 4 (1975) was exhibited in a selection of gouaches and oils at the Galerie Angst + Orny, in Munich, at the same time as an extensive retrospective of drawings at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Hilton Kremer, reviewing the New York exhibition, drew attention to the trajectory of Scott’s still lifes:

In the earlier drawings, there is more attention lavished on representational detail – details constantly and eloquently subject to correction, revision and the shifting ambiguities of perception – whereas in the later drawings, there is a more intense concentration and simplification. Objects and light, together with the spaces they occupy, are transmuted into a bold orchestration of shapes, textures and tonalities. ₃

In Chelsea Suite No. 4, Scott distils his subject to the chalk silhouette of a plate, with a knife, lemon and two pears, against a charcoal-grey ground. Enigmatically, he crops the second pear to a marginal sliver, as if it has just rolled out of sight.

₁ William Scott, in William Scott: Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches 1938–71, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).

² David Sylvester, ‘Sickert’, in About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–96 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 155

₃ Hilton Kramer, ‘Art: Seeing an Emotion’s Shape’, New York Times (11 January 1975), p. 21.

The Artist

Waddington Galleries, London, May 11, 1987

Private Collection, USA

Thence by descent

Amanda A Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, published by the Henry Moore Foundation, 2005, no.267, p. 176

London, Serpentine Gallery, William Turnbull, 1995 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 1998, cat no.1, p.16, illustrated p.17 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 2004 illustrated p.32 (another cast);

London, Sotheby’s S|2, William Turnbull, 9 October – 17 November 2017, p.140, illustrated p.17 (another cast).

‘The idea of metamorphosis in Turnbull’s work is at its most intense in the Blade Venus series. These large sculptures suggest the shapes of Chinese knives, Japanese Samurai swords, pens, paintbrushes, leaves and goddess figures in one elegant, slightly curved form. Their form and inspiration relate them to the Zen paintings that inspired Turnbull and to the calligraphic paintings, drawings and reliefs that he produced in the 1950s. Like a single gesture, with a wide and a thin section, they combine all of the breadth of the front view with the slenderness of the side view in one perception. Part of their ambiguity and their dynamic presence stems from the spectators’ simultaneous ability to see both the wide element and the narrow section as the handle or the blade or tip of the tool. Although they are absolutely still they are also balanced on their sharpest point, poised to act.’

(Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation & Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, pp.72-73).

Dr Patrick Woodcock, by whom gifted to the present owner
Private Collection, Ireland
Osborne Samuel London

Vaughan was familiar with Worbarrow Bay on the Isle of Purbeck and painted several works inspired by its craggy, limestone cliffs (see Purbeck Landscape 1963; Small Limestone Landscape, 1963 and Black Purbeck Landscape, 1964). The coastline is popular with sea divers, not least because of the dramatic underwater boulders and gullies and the wreck of a barge off Worbarrow Tout. The present work was inspired by an incident from the previous year. In the summer of 1963, Vaughan drove down to the Jurassic Coast specifically to hunt for new subjects. While sitting having a drink at the Swanage Hotel, he recorded in his journal an encounter with some sea divers that morning:

We drove down on Saturday through hideous traffic until at Romney we cut adrift & took byways through the New Forest. Blissful Isolation & open roads. Beer & Sandwiches at a little pub. There were perfect moments – the first view of Chapman’s Pool on Sunday morning, crossing the stubbly field near the farm, the low stone wall. And then the sudden unsuspected drop away & the bay far below, nearly deserted, china blue.

The scramble down – knee-breaking. So much further than it looks, the distances always deceptive in this landscape which was made for Mastodons. Then the group of skin divers which appeared from outer space, peeling on their incredibly erotic, skin tight rubbers, crutch piece, belt of lead, leggings, top piece, helmet & goggles. Then they set off face down on the water, dozens at a time, only their red periscopes showing. (Keith Vaughan, Journal XLIV – supplement, Swanage, July 29-31, 1963).

The group of figures are preparing for their dive. The standing, foreground figure, complete with flippers and swimming trunks, dominates the composition. Arms raised, he prepares to ‘peel on’ his gear. His friends stand or sit on a rock close by. The neutral palette indicates a grey overcast day and the patches of black and splashes of paint evoke the rubbery squelch of their diving suits. Areas of collage and hand-rendered lettering (these are not unknown elsewhere in Vaughan’s more improvisatory gouaches) can also be seen and add to the texture and inventive quality of the imagery.

Gerard Hastings

Redfern Gallery, London 

Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London 

Christie’s London, 1991

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above) 

Osborne Samuel, London

In 1964 Vaughan bought a row of derelict cottages in the heart of the Essex countryside and set about renovating them. He created a small studio upstairs where he worked on small-scale oil paintings and gouaches at the weekends and during the summer months. Having nowhere to swim, he cleared a patch of land at end of the garden and excavated a waterhole. Railway sleepers interspersed with plants were dug into a shallow embankment to create a picturesque setting. The pool was more than a mere source of recreation. The theme of bathers had been a central subject in Vaughan’s work since the mid 1940s and now he began to paint friends reclining and drying themselves at the water’s edge in his garden. Two Bathers by a Pool depicts such a scene. Fellow artists were invited to visit Harrow Hill cottage at weekends. Patrick Procktor was a regular guest from 1966 onwards as was Mario Dubsky, one of Vaughan’s most talented pupils at the Slade. He recalled days spent making drawings of each other by the pool and Vaughan being at his most relaxed:

‘Keith and Patrick and I had some great fun. We held summer parties in the garden, swimming naked of course, and drank freezing drinks in between skinny dips in the pool. Mrs. Vaughan sometimes sat knitting in her deckchair, at the other end [of the garden], keeping a watchful eye on us. God knows what she thought of me and Patrick larking around after several gins. But we also had some serious discussions well into the night, about painting and literature. Keith would tell me what I should be reading. Patrick and Keith used to talk endlessly about the ways they could turn their personal experiences of life into art.’1

Procktor also brought with him the filmmaker Derek Jarman who, apparently, loved nothing better than to strip down and dive off the railway sleepers into the pool. The BAFTA-winning documentary maker Peter Adam visited along with his illustrious friends, including David Hockney, the grand master of the pool-painting genre. He recalled them all swimming and wallowing together in Vaughan’s garden pond – a far cry from the glamorous Californian pools he was used to:

‘David was living in Los Angeles but on his annual visit to his family in Bradford, (his mother still thought that it was the sun that bleached his hair!), he always took care to visit Keith. Once we drove in his new Morris Minor convertible to Essex. We splashed about in his little natural pool…All that amused Keith greatly.’2

Gerard Hastings

1. Mario dubsky, from gerard hastings, ‘paradise found and lost: keith vaughan inessex’, pagham press, 2016 

2. Peter adam, from ‘gerard hastings, keith vaughan: the photographs’,pagham press, 2013

Lefevre Gallery, London
Private Collection, UK, c.1946

Thence by descent

Osborne Samuel, London

London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Four Young British Painters: Michael Ayrton, John Minton, William Scott and Keith Vaughan 1946, no. 24

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

Only a handful of Vaughan’s oil paintings survive dating from the 1930s. Although he was in his twenties when he painted them, nonetheless they demonstrate qualities of confidence and self-assurance. Several, both full- and half-length, represent young men seated or standing (Seated Figure in an Armchair, c. 1937 and Portrait of Dick Vaughan, c. 1935) ,while others, as we see here, are simple portrait heads glowing against a sombre background. In each, the adolescent sitters are viewed in a three-quarter pose, turning to the right and conceived volumetrically with light and shade. The absence of background details or distracting settings compels that the viewer to focus attention on the features and facial expression of the model.

Although his identity remains uncertain, the sitter in Portrait Head is probably Dick Vaughan the artist’s younger brother. Vaughan received no formal training as a painter; he did not attend an art school and was largely self-taught. Having no access to professional models, his brother Dick was often cajoled into sitting for photographs and drawings. An oil on board portrait of him exists which dates from 1935, the same time Portrait Head was executed, and the two models bear more than passing resemblance to each other. At the start of the war Dick Vaughan accepted a short-term commission from the Royal Air Force and, in May 1940, was shot down over the river Meuse near Rheims. Two weeks later, Vaughan registered as a conscientious objector stating at his tribunal that he ‘objected to the wilful slaughter of my fellow men.’

A sensuous, youthful quality is given off by the rosy colours and fleshy application of the pigments which, in addition, lend a sense of vitality to the sitter. His facial expression, on the other hand, conveys a reflective, melancholic mood as though he quietly considers his place in the world or reflects on something inexpressible, unspoken and deeply felt. If this is, in fact, a portrait of the young Dick Vaughan, these qualities make the portrait even more poignant.